I Married the Klondike

Laura Beatrice Berton

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781789120592
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

First published in 1954, this is a true story of love and adventure which traces the history of Dawson City through the eyes of a young schoolteacher from Canada and the penniless Yukon miner she married…
"This is a brave book. It is a record of a woman's courage and devotion in a hostile land. It is the story of a refined and sensitive girl who found happiness the hard way, and triumphed over conditions that would have driven most women to distraction. It is also a tribute to a husband who with hand, heart and head was outstanding in a world of worthy men.
"I have read many books on the Yukon, but this is different...It is the gallant personality of the author which shines on every page, and makes her chronicle a saga of the High North." (Robert W. Service, Preface)

FOURTEEN

WE RETURNED to Whitehorse again in early June, in time for the mosquitoes. Frank was waiting for us, bursting with the news that he had purchased a twenty-eight-foot boat for the voyage downriver. We would float back to Dawson, live in the open, go to bed in sleeping bags, eat meals on sandbars, catch fish and see wild animals.

“She’s an old poling boat, the biggest I could find,” Frank told us. “She’s good and long and has a flat bottom. She hardly draws any water at all. That should make it easy at the rapids.”

We were standing outside the White Pass Hotel, and looking up the street we now saw the familiar figure of Bishop Stringer striding towards us.

“What’s this about the lot of you floating down the river in a boat?” the bishop asked.

“All the way,” Frank said.

“I suppose you’ve got a good engine.”

“No engine. We’re going to drift.”

“Well,” said the bishop, “at least it has a poetical sound—’drifting down to Dawson’. But what about Le Barge?”

“I’m fixed for that. I’ve got a sail I’m going to rig up. We came through that way in ‘98 in less time than you can shake a stick at.”

“You must have had a good wind, that’s all I can say. This time you may not be so lucky. You may find yourself rowing that boat for thirty miles.”

“I doubt that.”

“Well, if you do, watch out for squalls on the lake and keep well over on the left bank. And look out for snags in the main river. You know what they’re like. Well, I’m off in a day or so myself, up the Pelly. Good luck to you.”

The bishop turned towards the White Pass offices then stopped.

“Incidentally, have you got a good mosquito bar? No? Well, then, take my advice and pick one up at Taylor and Drury’s. They’re four-fifty and a bargain.”

For this piece of advice we thanked the bishop and his Lord every night of the trip and for many nights thereafter.

The whole town had known of our expedition long before we arrived and most of the Whitehorse people thought we were utterly crazy. Many men and a few women had drifted down the Yukon river in a variety of craft, but this was the first time that a family of four, including two young children both under six years of age, had made the journey—and for fun.

“This is the craziest thing we ever did,” I told Frank as we walked down to the river that evening to inspect the new boat.

“Nothing of the kind,” Frank said. “Perfectly safe. Good experience for the kids.” He paused on the bank and pointed down to the waterside, at a long, green craft bobbing in the river.

“There she is. Lots of room in that for the kids to play in. I got her from an old prospector for fifty dollars.”

He jumped into the boat and did a sprint around the gunwale.

“See—she simply won’t tip.”

In the face of his enthusiasm I kept my peace, but secretly my mind was full of the darkest misgivings about this venture.

“You’ll have to line up all the grub first thing in the morning,” Frank was saying. “Make out a careful list and then double the order. That’s what we did in ‘98.”

Back at the hotel we found a mounted policeman waiting to see us. It was customary, he explained, for the force to keep details of all journeys down the river, the names of those participating, destination, estimated time of arrival, identification and so on. The suggestion made me uneasy. It reminded me of an operation I’d had when, just before going under the ether, a brisk matron arrived to ask me my religion and the names of my next of kin.

Our adventure began the next day at noon, the boat laden down with tent, sleeping bags, blankets, boxes of food, axe and shovel, pots and pans and toys for the children. Frank gave a hefty push, we swept away from the bank out into the main channel of the swift, glacier-blue river, and a moment or so later we were around the bend and alone with the wilderness.

It was a brilliant day with an exhilarating breeze, the atmosphere so clear that the snow-covered peaks sixty miles away and the closer granite mountains appeared almost unreal. I felt I was looking at a freshly painted stage curtain and the effect was enhanced by the new green of the spring foliage, the bright splashes of wild flowers on the banks and the coveys of swallows skimming by.

Swollen by spring freshets, the river sparkled and danced, gurgling under the boat’s flat bottom and hissing from its hundreds of whirlpools. Logs, pieces of driftwood and whole trees torn up by the roots raced along with us. We passed a submerged island with only a few treetops visible; we grated on a sandbar; we got caught in an eddy under the bank. On we went, past sloughs, past islands, past thickly wooded gullies. An old man, sitting in the door of a mudroofed cabin, gazed at us without blinking. A group of brown little children ran down to stare at us from an Indian camp and scrambled for the oranges that we threw to them. A flock of duck rose from a quiet backwater between two islands and skimmed across our prow.

The children were tucked together into the prow of the boat. I sat amidships. In the stern, paddle in hand, watching the river, was Frank. I began to experience a sense of excitement and adventure, and the feeling of foreboding that had been strong within me at Whitehorse now passed.

As the warm afternoon sun rose in the sky, the children settled down on cushions in the bottom of the boat and went to sleep while I lay back on a roll of blankets and gave myself up to the shifting world of trees and rocks and islands and sky slipping past us. Soon I, too, dozed off.

Frank was calling out:

“It’s nearly five. We ought to be looking for water. Keep your eyes peeled for a gulch and remember to tell me in plenty of time. I’ve got to get over to the bank, remember, and we can’t navigate upstream.”

“There!” I cried, pointing.

“No good. No shore for the kids to run. Anyway, you spoke too late.”

Farther on we spotted a perfect cove. Here we filled our pails from a gurgling freshet.

“Let’s camp here,” I said. “It’s lovely—and look at all those flowers.”

“Camp here? Among all this green stuff? No thanks! We’d be eaten alive by mosquitoes. We’ll have to find a sandbar in the middle of the river.”

We finally found a wind-swept gravel bar devoid of both mosquitoes and kindling wood and here we camped. Frank took the boat for wood across the river, then cut poles for our ten-by-twelve tent, while I made supper. After the meal I cooked up a pot of porridge, clamped the lid on tight, covered it with an insulating garment of moss and buried it deep in the sand. In this primitive fireless cooker it would cook all night and be a fine thick jelly in the morning.

And here we slept through the bright northern night, rising early next morning to reach Lake Le Barge while the wind was fair. Yet, hurry as we did, it was still ten-thirty before we pushed off. In spite of the nomadic life, the same old round of housework—fires, meals, dishwashing—pursued us in the woods.

We fed well. We lunched that day on a long, clean sandbar and I cooked a substantial meal on a driftwood fire. I cooked soup, mutton chops with carrots and potatoes, boiled custard and preserved strawberries. It sounds simpler than it was. A swarm of houseflies descended on me as soon as I unpacked the meat. Half-way through the cooking operations the children buried each other in sand and had to be thoroughly whisked, washed, brushed and combed. Just as we sat down with a full dinner plate—on a table held down with stones and brushed clean of insects—a wind sprang up and we found ourselves caught in a river sandstorm. I have never since been able to eat a mutton chop without tasting grit.

That evening we camped at the entrance of Lake Le Barge, pitching our tent on a high bank above the river. As we ate supper, the thin drone of a motor-boat could be heard approaching. It was the first craft we’d seen since leaving Whitehorse, so we watched it with interest.

The boat contained four Indians. They tied up to the bank, climbed out, filed up the cliff, responded to Frank’s greeting with the merest grunt, then plumped themselves down on the ground. I offered them supper; they shook their heads solemnly. We began to resume our meal; they sat and watched us silently. We occasionally tried to make conversation; they replied only with “yuh” or a “nuh”. Yet they were obviously enjoying themselves, for their eyes followed our every movement with fascination. They sat thus for an hour watching us, then, as if by unspoken command, all four stood up at once and filed off as silently as they came.

Lake Le Barge is thirty miles long and up to five miles wide. It is ringed by mountains, and on the right-hand side they sweep right down to the water’s edge to provide scenes of unparalleled beauty. As dangerous squalls spring up frequently, it was to the left side with its sheltered coves that we steered our boat the following morning. The wind was due south and Frank swiftly raised his sail. He had hardly done so when the wind switched to the north and to our disgust stayed this way for our entire trip down the lake. The sail, except for very brief periods, was useless and Frank had to bend to the oars. Instead of the five hours we had expected to navigate the lake in, we spent five nights on what Service describes as “the marge of Lake Le Barge”.

At the head of the lake we had our lunch by an old derelict steamboat, half buried in the sand. This was the old Olive May, immortalized 15 years earlier as the Alice May in whose boiler Sam McGee was supposed to have been cremated. A man’s body actually had been cremated in the boiler of the Olive May, by a Dr. Sugden, who was sent out from Whitehorse to give medical attention to a sick prospector. The man was dead and frozen stiff when Sugden arrived, and as he had no tools to bury the body, the doctor cremated it in the ship’s boiler and brought the ashes back to town. Later, Sugden and Service lived together and this undoubtedly explains the origin of the ballad about the man from Tennessee who never could get warm enough in the Yukon.

When we were half-way down the lake I made the distressing discovery that our flour had disappeared. Undoubtedly we had left it behind at our last camp. We still had a good fifteen miles to cover before we reached Lower Le Barge, where we would buy flour and bread at the telegraph station.

“We’ll have to speed up a little,” Frank said. “In the meantime—rations. The children can have the bread that’s left. We’ll get by on biscuits and rice.”

But it was another two days before we sighted the log cabin that houses the Lower Le Barge telegraph station. Fortunately we caught a salmon-trout two feet in length, which did us for three meals. Le Barge is noted for its fish, and as much as a ton and a half a week has been shipped from the lake to Dawson and Whitehorse.

We saw not a soul the entire length of the lake, which was as still and as empty of life as it had been in the days before the flotillas of the gold-seekers crossed it in June of ‘98. Only on the fifth day did civilization, in the form of the steamer Casca, cross our path. We looked up at the boat and waved to the tourists and they waved back, wondering, I have no doubt, who this strange family was, and what they were doing with two small children here in the wilderness. It occurred to me that they must have looked down upon us from the deck above much as I had looked down from the same deck upon the bank clerk who had gone native, as he and his children waved at the passing steamer.

At the foot of the lake we saw a single log cabin in a small clearing. This was the Lower Le Barge telegraph station and here we put in. We were mildly surprised to find that the telegrapher was expecting us. Indeed he knew all about us, as everyone on the river did. We had been so long coming down the lake that the police, who were always vigilant about such things, had become worried and wired ahead to the station to see if there was any word. In Dawson, I discovered later, we were given up for dead.

We pitched our tent on the bank in front of the telegrapher’s cabin. Across the river, in the light summer dusk, a campfire glowed brightly. We waved at the two figures standing beside it, and they waved back. Then a boat moved out from the bank and came across to our side of the river. The two men in the boat turned out to be medical students from the University of California. They were travelling down the river peddling a medical book on home first aid, and from its proceeds they hoped to be able to make enough to continue their studies. At first, their trip sounded mad to us, as ours must have to them. But it turned out they were doing very well. The customers, to be sure, were few and far between, but every single man on the river had bought their book. This was not to be wondered at, for men were so glad to see anybody that the purchase of a book was a small-enough token of appreciation for the alleviation of their loneliness. Besides, it was a practical book for people living on the river without recourse to medical aid.

I was able to buy some flour at the station and the next morning we made our way to a pretty little island set in a maze of shallow sloughs. Here we decided to set up housekeeping for a couple of days. I had a good-sized bundle of washing to do as well as a batch of bread to make.

As we were using dried yeast cakes for the bread, the question arose as to how to keep it warm through the night. For although the days were hot enough to peel our faces with sunburn, the nights were chilly. We solved the problem simply enough by taking the bread to bed with us. There, wrapped in an eiderdown, along with a hot-water bottle, it reposed cosily until morning. Unsanitary, perhaps, but at least it rose.

After breakfast I made up the loaves in coffee cans and set them out in the sun. In the meantime Frank prepared an oven. First, he scooped a hole in the sandy bank and lined it with flat stones. Inside this he built a fire. When the stones and sand were thoroughly heated through he raked out the coals and inserted the covered tins of dough. He closed the opening with a large, flat stone and banked it with more hot sand. After an hour, I removed the loaves. I doubt if they would have won a prize in a baking contest, but they were good eating all the same.

The next section of the Yukon is known as the Thirty-mile and we found it the most scenic part of the entire trip. The swift, glacial water was a brilliant Mediterranean blue and so clear that gazing down into it we could count every pebble on the bottom. The beauty was deceptive, for the channel was narrow and the river a maze of snakelike twists. Captain Campbell of the Casca once told me he considered the Thirty-mile the most dangerous piece of river in the world. There are two tortuous hairpin turns on this river set so closely together that they form an almost perfect S. In the early days of navigation t...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• FOUR
• FIVE
• SIX
• SEVEN
• EIGHT
• NINE
• TEN
• ELEVEN
• TWELVE
• THIRTEEN
• FOURTEEN
• FIFTEEN
• SIXTEEN
• SEVENTEEN
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER